Visiting Shipshewana, Indiana: A Sober Travel Guide to Amish Country

My first night in Shipshewana, Indiana, I went out for a walk to catch the last traces of the sunset. It was the end of April and twilight lingered late. The sky was a bruise blue as the fading light glowed over fields and barns. The town’s main street was quiet before nine o’clock, with only a few people out and the shops closed. Then a resounding clip clop echoed off the pavement in this flat landscape. The sound bounced all around me in the darkness until a black buggy came into view, pulled by a horse with a businesslike trot.

During my three days in Amish country in northeast Indiana, I got more accustomed to that clip clop sound. But it continued to thrill me with the mystery of a life lived so differently. Indiana’s northeastern corner gives visitors a peek into this separate culture living right next door in parts of the US.

Amish 101

The Amish are a conservative Christian sect that trace their roots to the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland in 1525, the time of the Protestant Reformation. Anabaptists believed in adult baptism—when people made a conscious choice to join the church—rather than infant baptism.

Today, the American Amish population is most concentrated in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. They aim to live simple lives separate from the mainstream.

I was especially interested in visiting Shipshewana because it’s that very rare thing: a dry town. While alcohol is served in the surrounding parts of LaGrange County, it’s banned within Shipshewana’s city limits.

The Amish church is as decentralized as AA. Communities divide into districts of 25 to 35 families, each led by a male bishop. The bishop leads his congregation in setting rules, which can vary substantially between districts. These rules could cover things like what sorts of technology are acceptable or not, and even influence dental care. Many districts favor extraction and dentures over high-cost repairs, which could indicate vanity.

Many Amish people don’t drink alcohol at all. Some drink in their homes. But you probably won’t see any Amish drinking in public, unless they’re teenagers during Rumspringa. This is the time when young people have a chance to experience worldly things like driving cars, wearing store-bought clothing and getting a bit wild before ultimately choosing whether or not to be baptized and rejoin the Amish fold.

It’s very confusing as an English person—that’s what Amish people call the non-Amish—to grasp the culture during a brief visit to Shipshewana. Some things are obvious, like driving a buggy instead of a car and wearing a shapeless dress and bonnet rather than something chic. But other issues are more nuanced. For example, the Amish aren’t necessarily against electricity so much as being attached to a power grid. I met an Amish furniture maker who ran his power tools with a generator.

I visited Menno-Hof, a nonprofit museum inside a house and big red barn, to learn more about lives of the Amish and related religions. Its exhibits and short films provide a crash course in the history of and differences between Anabaptist sects—Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites. A tour guide will take you through in about an hour and 15 minutes. I had to take the abridged tour because of limited time, but could easily have spent two hours in there.

Amish shopping

Despite being simple people, the Amish love to shop and wheel and deal. My first morning in Shipshewana, I went to the weekly Wednesday auction at Shipshewana Trading Place. My group of travel media attended a short intro to auctions session before getting turned loose—and into trouble—on the auction floor.

“Every week that barn is completely different,” Lora Gates, marketing director for Shipshewana Trading Place, told us. “Every Tuesday, sellers come in, they set up the whole barn. You’ll see how large it is. By the end of the day, Wednesday, that barn is swept out.” The auction started in 1922 and is still run as a family business. Both sellers and bidders come from all over the Midwest and the Eastern US.

I was pretty excited to get into that barn and take a look around. But first, we stopped off in the office to get bidder numbers. Then we were free to roam around and look at the different areas set up inside like a swap meet. Merchandise ranged from beautiful glassware to rusty junk. My favorite lot was the contents of an abandoned Odd Fellows lodge. This fraternal organization’s initiation rites included elaborate costumes, velvet thrones, and coffins with fake skeletons inside! But try shipping that from Indiana to Portland, Oregon.

We arrived right before the official bell rang at nine AM, setting the auctioneers into their fast talking. About six auctions happen at once, each with an auctioneer and a clerk to jot down who’s buying what. Being an auction newbie, I could not keep up. I wasn’t sure if the price was 40, 140 or 340. At one point I realized I was holding my bidding number in the same hand that I was lifting up to snap photos with my phone. I quit that in a hurry.

Later, we visited a store called Glick’s Lawn Furniture and glimpsed where some of this auction stuff ends up. “So it started out about 30 years ago. I was just probably about that tall,” Jason Glick says, indicating the height of a six-year-old while we stand amidst an incredible array of lawn furniture, old buggies, bins and piles of mysterious treasures. Or maybe junk. “We started going to a few auctions here and there, something that my dad and I kind of enjoyed. And we’d buy a few things, bring it back and put it in the store. It’s been growing ever since that.” I also found a thrift store where you can buy used Amish dresses and bonnets.

Since Amish avoid birth control, generally leaving family planning to God, families skew large. And so do the shopping trips. Glen Bontrager gave us a tour of E&S Sales Bulk Foods, the Amish answer to Costco. Glen proudly shared E&S annual stats: 30,000 whoopie pies, 42,000 cookies, 221,000 pounds of dried noodles, 37,000 loaves of bread and 14,000 pizzas. When Glen first started at E&S, they did mail order with people sending cash or checks through the mail. “Ninety percent of all the letters that I got had blank checks in them,” he said. He’d process the order, add shipping, and fill in the total. Now that’s a trusted business! My favorite thing at E&S was the biggest selection of colored sugar I’ve ever seen.

I’ve saved perhaps the best shopping for last: the phenomenally huge flea market. It runs May through September. I was in Shipshewana a week too early. Otherwise, I might still be there.

Amish entertainment

One of the more unusual things I encountered in Shipshewana was a musical theater company specializing in plays about Amish people. Local entrepreneur Mel Riegsecker started out making and selling miniature horse drawn buggies in 1980. He added an ice cream stand for his customers, then a restaurant. He kept expanding his vision and offerings. Folks needed a place to sleep, so he opened Blue Gate Garden Inn, the very comfortable hotel where I stayed. And they needed something to do at night, so he built a couple of venues—one focused on music, and one on theater.

Andy Rohrer, VP of sales and marketing for Blue Gate Hospitality, said of Mel, “He got approached by a gentleman from Nashville who said, ‘Hey, Mel, we found this article in the New York Times about how people aren’t buying books anymore. Except in one genre: Amish fiction.’ That was the only genre that was growing.” And so Riegsecker started getting Amish novels adapted into musicals. The one we saw, “A Simple Sanctuary,” was about a woman who gets in trouble with criminals and hides out at an Amish B&B. I enjoyed my first foray into Amish-themed musical theater. One of my colleagues complained it was hokey, and okay, it was, but it was fun and they could really sing.

Outdoor recreation

The area around Shipshewana is very pretty, mostly flat, farmland. It looks like a nice place for biking. I, however, am always seeking water. So I headed toward nearby Mongo, Indiana to kayak on the Pigeon River.

Andy Linder owns Trading Post Outfitters in Mongo. He and his wife Jess left the big city of Indianapolis to raise their kids a woodsier way. Now they run a campground, general store, and river trips.

What’s so special about this corner of northeastern Indiana? “It’s in the middle of the Pigeon River Fish & Wildlife Area,” Andy said. “So we have 12,000 acres surrounding our river.” You’ll hardly see a house in the 26 miles of river his company kayaks. “Everything else is pure woods, pure nature. Blue herons, sandhill cranes, deer, bald eagles, osprey.” And lots of cute little turtles.

We did a four-mile trip. The water was high and fast since it was early in the season, so it was very easy. We tried not to paddle too much lest the trip be over in a blink. It’s amazing that there’s such a forested area so close to the farmland around Shipshewana. “As far as the Midwest goes, this is about the most serene river experience you can get,” Andy said.

It’s a peaceful area. The Amish people have their separate culture, but they are hospitable to outsiders. It was a fun trip where nothing centered on alcohol.

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